Oc's Christmas Sleaze-a-thon: We're starting, baby

Image by paulbr75 at Pixabay

Welcome, everyone, to a very special announcement.

It's no secret that I like good cinema and love great cinema, but absolutely adore bad cinema. There's just this unique charm to cinematic trash made with real passion that you can't get from entertainment made with skill and technique. I realize I'm not saying anything thousands of cinema nerds haven't said before, but that doesn't make this any less true. Every trash enthusiast has a favorite era of bad movies - some are into cheesy 50's and 60's monster flicks, others prefer crappy 80's horror, yet others are into grindhouse, or Asylum and SyFy wonders like Sharktopus vs. Whalewolf (yes, that's a real movie). Me, I have a real fondness for grindhouse, action and exploitation stuff, but I realize that a whole bunch of those movies are genuine crap, and unpleasant crap to boot, especially on the misogyny front. I'm always on the lookout for grindhouse and cult movies with real value to them - artistic value, novelty value, hell, even just accidental comedy, you name it. I've been collecting flaming garbage fires as well as genuine and deservedly beloved cinematic gems for a while, and because I've suddenly and inexplicably lost my mind a few days ago, I decided to go through them all. In one go.

Okay, not really - what I've had in mind is to assemble a list of 42 sleazy, schlocky and/or campy genre movies, with special attention to the grindhouse, exploitation and cult classic field, and have a movie marathon until Christmas where I watch a movie each day. (Why until Christmas? Well, because I'm pretty sure that if I spent His Son's birthday by watching something like Naked Vengeance the good Lord would smite me, and I don't even believe in Him. No, actually, I just want to spend the holidays with family rather than with Roger Corman.) Now, obviously my brain would fry and leak out through my ears if I actually did this, but the goal is to watch at least 30 movies out of the 42 on my list, with 12 days to either not watch something because I don't feel like it, or nope out because the movie is just that bad. I'm going to write a post with mini-reviews of each movie I've watched roughly every 5 to 10 movies (any longer than that and I'd end up with a bunch of Frankenposts nobody will read because they're lengthier than a Terms and Conditions page); and a year's end recap of the marathon as a whole, regardless of whether I fail or manage to watch at least 30 movies in the next month and a half.

As a bit of a sneak peek of what I'm about to subject myself to, here are a few titles from my list: TNT Jackson; Coffy; Planet Terror; Cradle of Fear; Plan 9 from Outer Space (ain't no true bad movie marathon without that one); Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!; The Bad Batch; Hobo With a Shotgun; The Beyond, and so on.

Pray for me to survive this. (Seriously though, I think it's gonna be fun.) See y'all soon with the first Frankenreview, folks.

Oculus Presents: Merry Book Haul, and a friend

Welcome, folks, to the biggest book haul this blog has ever seen.

I don't normally go on book-shopping sprees, but every now and then I feel like I'm allowed to splurge a little - and sometimes books I ordered separately all arrive at the same time and bury me with a very welcome avalanche. This time, I got five books within a week of each other! I've been very excited to get to these babies for different reasons, and they look quite nice on the Shelf, too. Four out of five I've ordered from Better World Books, which I very much recommend for you folks to check out - they have an excellent horror and genre fiction selection, offer free shipping on many titles, and they do a lot of good work with nonprofits and donated books with the money they get from book purchases, so you're doing something good while scoring great finds for your own shelf. Win-win scenario!

The fifth book is from my trusty Thriftbooks - a pricier venture shipping-wise, but one whose selection has never disappointed me. And as to what those books are? Well...

First of all, the greats - King and Matheson. I really dig the cover of Thinner, although the premise of the book is a little... uh... we'll burn that bridge when we get to it. I Am Legend, on the other hand, is a book I've been looking forward to for a while. I find both the shouting Will Smith sticker and the praise from Dean Koontz, hackmaster extraordinaire, a little comical; but the rest of the cover is very atmospheric, and I've heard nothing but good about the book itself. We shall see whether it holds up to that praise, but I've read from Matheson before and I trust his writing a whole lot.

Next is this great little find: a YA horror from the 80's, and one with the true rarity of having gay characters, even in the main cast if my memory doesn't fail me. I have mixed feelings about the YA phenomenon, but I've read a lot of great YA books - some even in the horror and thriller genre, and they were delightful -, and between the premise of YA horror, the gay characters and this awesome cover, The Lake is a book I'm very eager to check out.

Poppy Z. Brite is one of those slightly lesser-known (to non-horror lit fans anyway) authors who were the powerhouses of horror publishing in the 1990's, known for being fresh, daring and original; and he in particular was known for featuring queer people and outcasts in a genre heavily dominated by straight white men as protagonists. That alone would win my undying respect, but then he also came out as trans - nowadays he goes by Billy Martin, although he still uses Poppy Z. Brite, his pre-transition pen name, professionally. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) And since I'm always up for reading more from minority authors, especially in horror, I've been glad to find this much-praised short story collection, from the famed Dell/Abyss line, at a pretty good price. I've only ever read one short story by Brite before, but unlike Clive Barker's writing (Hellbound Heart, the novella Hellraiser is based on, is an awkward book to say the least), I really liked what I'd seen of him so far.

And finally, this well-loved, but still wonderful copy of Borderlands, a boundary-pushing horror anthology from genre greats like Harlan Ellison and Joe R. Lansdale, with one hell of a cover. Fantastic work by Dave McKean (the title is on the black part, but it's done in transparent reflective foil, so it's only visible in a certain lighting). As for whether the stories inside are just as great... well, other horror blogs tell me a very resounding YES.

Thus concludes the book haul - I have two more on the way, and then the book-shopping shall stop for a while; both because I have enough stuff to read for a year, and because the Shelf is getting rather full. (But worry not, gentle reader! I have a bigger bookshelf on my other wall.) As for the friend I mentioned...

Yorick?

 

I've been organizing my bookshelf for the umpteenth time, and I relocated my Tolkien collection (why yes, I am a giant nerd, why do you ask?) to a more visible spot; and then I couldn't resist adding an extra touch of fantasy with this wizard figurine I bought from an antiques fair. Someone get me a Boromir figurine or a dragon to go with it, and my bliss shall be complete.

Oculus Reviews: Thanks a lot, Horace Walpole

Welcome, folks, to Oculus Reviews.

 

Why, oh why do I keep catching the crap of the crop when it comes to 70's Gothic novels?! I've gotta stop picking up little-known stuff with pretty covers and good taglines, because it turns out that a lot of obscure books are obscure for a reason. I mean, as far as bad books go, the one I'm discussing today wasn't nearly as yeet-your-brain irritating as Nella Waits, but it also didn't have much else going for it, other than some absolutely hilaribad prose every now and then. And that isn't nearly enough to carry a book... even a 192-page one.

Let's dive in, shall we?

In The Terrified Heart, a 1973 novel by Alicia Grace (actually the pseudonym of one Irving Greenfield, as you will soon be painfully aware), Danielle Marsh is a 24 year-old university professor of ancient Greek with a PhD and two years of teaching experience, and okay, I need to call a time-out because what. Either she skipped a grade, or the author skipped a number on the keyboard when he wrote this - and trust me, you're only getting a taste of the level of magnificent realism and thorough editing this book stands at (other gems include Danielle hoping for a "ddcent" relationship, and one character having a master's "certicate" in... sailing, sure). Anyway, she one day respons to a newspaper ad with a job offer by one Keith Wyler, a wealthy, brilliant translator haunted by the murder of his wife that he was accused of. He wants Danielle to work as his assistant at translating an ancient manucript; the catch? She has to go with him to his family mansion, posing as his wife, because insert incredibly flimsy bullshit excuse about family traditions and marriage that even a baby squirrel would see through, but which fools Danielle instantly. The real reason he wants her is to lure out the murderer of his dead wife by turning up with a new one, which is supposed to... Hell if I know. What a chessmaster.

 

So off the zeroes go to Eleusis, the Wyler estate... after several days spent with very essential things like clothes shopping, and awkwardly wrestling with the author insisting they're madly in lust with each other, despite having less spark than a firefighter convention. And they reach the mansion after page... 118. Out of 192. God give me patience.

To tell you folks what happens at Eleusis would be a spoiler (not that anyone would mind, I think, since about two people and a shoelace must be planning to read this), but this book is, holy moly macaroni, where do I even begin. It's not terrible, mind you - but it's so achingly mediocre that spending even the five or so hours reading it are five hours from my life I will never get back. The plot is basically nonexistent until past the middle of the book, after which point plot revelations randomly happen or are just plain told to the characters, to wrap things up in time for a slapped-together finale that made me facepalm. The characters - the ingenue heroine, Diet Mr. Rochester, his evil, unfaithful murdered wife, crazy aunt, hateful disabled brother and sweet old family friend/surrogate father figure - are papier-mache, the descriptions are dry, dull and full of telling, not showing. (And like I said, I was painfully aware that this book was written by a man at each of the gazillion descriptions of the heroine's naked or near-naked body, and especially at the scene where she's taking a bath and takes the time to describe the way her breasts float in the water. Ladies, if your boobs do that, please see a doctor. Or an exorcist.) Also, every now and then the author commits acts of violence against the English language for no reason, like Danielle "obediently" shaking her head to accept a job offer, or Aunt Elizabeth having a "corking-like voice", whatever the hell that means - does she sound like a champagne bottle being popped? But my absolute favorites have to be Danielle comparing unrequited love to a seed planted in shallow soil four pages in (ease up, Emily Brontë, you're in 1973, not 1873), or her landlady expressing her disapproval of Keith's job offer thusly:

"Young people today are not only willing to play in the frying pan, but they must also jump into the fire."

 

What has that poor idiom ever done to you?!

Despite the... everything, I can't say I wasn't the least bit entertained while reading this book. There's a certain dollar-store trashy charm to how ineptly written it is, and since it was so short, it didn't torture me with said ineptitude until I lost my patience, like the other Gothic novel I slam-dunked into the metaphorical trash... I mean, reviewed on this blog. But this is faint praise indeed. I can't in good faith recommend it because there are both much, much better and much more entertainingly bad books for y'all to pass the time with, but... but... at least the cover is pretty?

Yeah, I've got nothin'. Don't read this book.

Writing: Corking-like voice. I rest my case. 1/5

Availability: I have found precisely one copy of it for sale on my usual book sites, although it only goes for a few dollars, plus shipping - make of that what you will. You might luck into another copy in a used bookstore like I did, but don't hold your breath. 2/5

Entertainment value: I'll admit that the hilaribad writing got the occasional chuckle out of me, and I did have a good time riffing the hell out of the plot with my writer friends, but without them it would have been a deadly dull experience. 2/5

Do I recommend it?: Do I look like I recommend it? 1/5

(I know, I know, don't explain the joke, but I've gotta - Horace Walpole was an architect and the author of The Castle of Otranto, usually considered the first work of Gothic fiction in the English literary canon. Thanks a lot for Nella Waits and The Terrified Heart, Horace.)

Oculus Presents: Latest finds for the Shelf

Heya, folks, this is Oculus Presents.

Been a bit busy these past few weeks with work, writing and suchlike, but that doesn't mean I stopped buying books or reading (these days I'm mostly doing literary fiction, that's why the blog has been a little quiet on the review front). As usual, I scour the used bookshops for anything neat I can find, and I've ordered a few... interesting things online as well, so the Shelf is quite teeming with life. I've managed to score an excellent vintage copy of To Kill a Mockingbird and a biography of Franz Liszt among others, but let me show you the ones relevant to my genre collection...

My earliest find, from last month, is this copy of Savage by Richard Laymon - a western novel about a young boy pursuing Jack the Ripper into the American Wild West. The premise sounds neat enough, and Laymon fans are eating up the book, but I haven't heard super mega great things about his writing skills from people whose tastes I trust, and the first chapter had a teenage boy in Victorian London calling people "tough hombres", which, er, yeah. I have a feeling that this is going to be an experience.

Something I'm already quite fond of, though, is this story collection by the awesome C. L. Moore. Catherine L. Moore was one of the pioneers of female speculative fiction writing in the pulp era of the 30's and 40's (although she didn't retire from writing until the early 60's). There had been other female specfic writers at the time, of course, but she had been probably the most iconic. This is a collection of her short stories with the rugged space adventurer, Northwest Smith, as the hero - including the first Northwest Smith story ever, Shambleau, which is one of my favorite short stories. She also wrote Jirel of Joiry, one of the earliest female sword-and-sorcery heroines, and let me just say, I'm dying to get my hands on a copy of that collection. I'm going to do a Moore-stravaganza on this blog where I review this collection and discuss Shambleau in more detail, but until then - let us admire this fantastic cover.

And finally, one of my favorite used book finds: this reprint of an iconic, much-respected collection of short vampire fiction, edited by the late Alan Ryan (who I'm quite fond of, if you recall from my review of Cast a Cold Eye). Dunno who the hell okayed this lackluster cover and the weird font choice (the original cover art, done by Edward Gorey, fit the book's themes so much more); but the collection has stories from Bram Stoker, August Derleth, Stephen King, Richard Matheson, C. L. Moore again and other genre greats, and I've heard that Alan Ryan was an editor of great taste in short fiction, so I'm very much looking forward to diving in. Not this year, alas (I have 25 books to read until the end of the year for various reading challenges I signed up for, pray for me - I swear it's fun though, or I wouldn't be doing it), but chipping away at this book, one short story at a time, sounds like the perfect entertainment for the upcoming chilly winter months.

Well, folks, that's it for today - I'll be returning soon with a few reviews, gods willing (two of the books I'm planning to read until December are Hawk & Fisher and Vampire Beat from the Shelf, and I'll try to fit in The Lure as well); and hopefully I can do something interesting to celebrate Halloween with, I'll figure out what. Until then, have a very spooky October, everyone.

Oculus Presents: The eighth passenger is Death

Hi, folks, welcome to Oculus Presents.

I'll be honest with y'all: the Hungarian title for Alien is mad dumb. A nyolcadik utas: a Halál (see the title of this post for the translation) is eye-catching, sure, but it doesn't represent the sheer dread in this movie nearly as much as the enigmatic original title - hell, it sounds more like the title of an Ingmar Bergman vehicle than 70's sci-fi horror. On the other hand, the first Hungarian cover for Alan Dean Foster's novelization might be one of my favorite book covers ever.

This edition is a 1987 release from the prolific speculative fiction publishing house Kozmosz Könyvek, translated by Piroska F. Nagy. I'll confess I haven't read it all the way through - I usually try to read books in their original language if I speak it - but the first few chapters had exactly the sort of moody, dreamlike tone you could expect from a cover like that. The work of artist Pál Varga, this cover evokes more the mood of vintage "cold" sci-fi flicks like Solaris or THX 1138, but at the same time it's actually faithful to the story, which is always welcome on a genre fiction book cover. The novelization has been released twice more in Hungarian with deeply "meh" covers (although hopefully better translations: as much as I liked the atmosphere of this version, it drove me nuts that both Ripley and Lambert were referred to as "girl" rather than "woman" by the narration, ugh), but the first edition of it is a real gem of Hungarian sci-fi publishing.

Oculus Presents: Another find for the Shelf O' Stuff

Welcome to Oculus Presents, folks.

I confess that for a long-ass time, I'd only known Patricia Highsmith as the author of the novel The Price of Salt (nowadays also published as Carol, after the movie adaptation), a groundbreaking piece of 1952 lesbian fiction. And then I found out she was actually a very acclaimed crime and thriller author of such classics as The Talented Mr. Ripley and Strangers on a Train. I know it usually happens the other way around when people get into her books, but either way, she's been on my to-read list for a while.

And then I found a copy of this book in a used bookshop.

Those Who Walk Away apparently is one of Ms. Highsmith's lesser-known thrillers, but it is still relatively widely read (bestselling crime author here) and has been published many times, in various languages. However, this particular edition with the wonderfully unsettling cover was released by Pan Books in 1970 as part of the very obscure Best of American Crime Fiction series (not to be confused with the other series titled The Best of American Crime Fiction, which came earlier and had a very different cover art style). And it is pretty much impossible to find on the internet. Nothing on Goodreads and Abebooks, nothing on eBay; only a few question marks from Pan paperback collectors, and copies for sale of various other books from this same series. Eventually I managed to dig up a blog entry on the Pan Books collectors' website, TiKiT, which includes at least a photo of this edition of Those Who Walk Away in the TiKiT catalog, proving that this is in fact a thing that people know about. I haven't the foggiest how valuable this edition is, nor do I particularly care, but it's definitely one of the hardest-to-find books I've tried to track down, especially from such a famous author. Whether the contents will hold up to that creepy cover remains for me to see, but I'm very glad to place it on the Shelf.

Update: I forgot to credit the designer behind this magnificently scary cover art - the back cover of the book tells me it's the work of one Tom Simmonds. Hats off, Mr. Simmonds.

Oculus Presents: Vintage Hungarian sci-fi goodness

Welcome back to Oculus Presents, folks.

Pre-90's Hungarian speculative fiction was... Well, it sure was. Oh, there's some truly legendary stuff out there - Péter Zsoldos was one of our pioneers of science-fiction and even had a literary award named after him, the old run of the sci-fi magazine Galaktika is still fondly spoken of for bringing the stories of the genre greats into Hungary (as for the resurrected version of the magazine, let's... just not go into that) and even early literary fiction giants like Mór Jókai, Frigyes Karinthy and Mihály Babits had written some genuinely creative fantastic fiction that stand out as true curiosities in the genre. Translations of stuff like Soviet sci-fi, classics like The Black Corridor as well as unapologetic pulp fiction have brought color to everyone's bookshelves since the second half of the 20th century. But there have been some truly mediocre, forgettable and straight-up unbearable Hungarian sci-fi books out there as well. I suppose that's just Sturgeon's Law for you, but there's one particular, not very fondly remembered Hungarian sci-fi anthology that still lives in my brain rent-free. For reasons.

moly.hu

Morel találmánya is a 1986 speculative fiction anthology released in Bucharest by the publishing house Kriterion, edited by Hugó Ágoston and illustrated by artist Géza Nagy. It collects stories from Voltaire, Guy de Maupassant, several Hungarian authors and others, as well as the somewhat famous novella by Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel, which also gives the anthology its title. It's a book which I have seen in literally every single used bookstore and library I've ever set foot into, and my family owns a copy as well, but even though it's everywhere in the literary scene, it's not widely read at all. Oh, boy.

The truth is that this anthology is just... not super great. It does contain a few interesting tidbits of Hungarian and European speculative fiction history (I'd legit had no idea that Voltaire had written sci-fi until I opened this book), but several of the stories chosen are stuffy, bloated and dated, more curiosities than actually enjoyable reads. I'll admit that I've tried and failed to get through this book a few times in the past; but there are reasons I'm featuring it on the blog.

Reason one: two of the stories. The Horla by Guy de Maupassant is by far the highest point of this book, a suffocating 1887 horror tale with only a tinge of the fantastic. More than anything, it's a tale of slowly mounting paranoia and dread turning into near-insanity, as the nameless narrator's life gets twisted and dominated by a mysterious creature haunting his home: a being he simply calls Horla. You can read the story at East of the Web, just be sure not to do it when you're home alone in the dark (or hell, that might just be the perfect way to read it), because I'm not kidding when I say that this is one scary-ass tale - a near-perfect example of pre-Lovecraft eldritch horror.

The other story in this book that's seriously worth reading is Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares's award-winning 1940 novella, The Invention of Morel. I also hesitate to call it a sci-fi story, as it calls to mind more the maddeningly logical, labyrinthine and unsettling works of Jorge Luis Borges (who himself commented on the story when it came out). The narrator is a nameless fugitive, hiding on what he thinks is a deserted island after his life in the outside world gets upended. Except the island isn't quite deserted: every now and then a flock of vacationers appears pretty much from nowhere, and disappears by the next day. And for whatever reason, they all totally ignore the fugitive despite his attempts to approach them. And when you find out who these people are, what they're doing on the island and why they just plain don't notice the narrator... Well, I won't spoil it for ya, but I still remember the chill crawling up my spine when I first read the conclusion to this novella. It's a little-talked about gem of fantastic fiction with a truly unsettling and suspenseful atmosphere, which culminates in an ending that won't leave your head any time soon. An absolute must-read for adventurous specfic readers who like oddities.

Now, reason two why I'm featuring this anthology here has nothing to do with the stories in it, and everything to do with the absolute creative genius of illustrator Géza Nagy. The book is full of crystal-clear and hyper-detailed black-and-white drawings, often done with a lot more style and personality than the stories themselves. The illustration for The Horla holds a truly special place in my heart as the scariest goddamn thing I've ever seen - I recall being maybe eight years old, innocently looking through the pages of the neat-looking book with the cool title, looking for something fun to read after I got through a few children's books from my family's library. And oh, god, I turned a page and got smacked in the face with freaking THIS:

Folks, I was days getting over the shock of this one. To this day I haven't seen such stark, gaunt terror captured in a drawing, except maybe in Munch's The Scream or the art of Junji Ito. An absolute, spine-tingling masterpiece.

This is my other favorite, from an odd and slightly creepy, but otherwise forgettable Hungarian story - just look at the rich details!

In conclusion... well, recommending this book would be a bit of a moot point unless you speak Hungarian, but it's definitely a real curiosity for genre fiction fans. Just not, you know, a great one. Read The Horla and read The Invention of Morel in English if you can find them, because they absolutely are worth a read - but given that both of these stories have been anthologized in other Hungarian editions, even as a Hungarian sci-fi fan it doesn't terribly bother me that this book kind of vanished from most people's eyes.

Except for the drawings. Man, those drawings.

Did somebody say vintage genre fiction shelf?

I've been organizing my library, and realized that I have a few real interesting pre-1990 genre paperbacks (except for The Lure, which is a hardcover, but it's a 70's thriller, so I say it counts) and decided to collect them in one place, just to see what they'd look like together. And they rock. Compared to some genuine literary collections out there this is a pretty meager offering; but for someone who lives in a non-English-speaking country, where I can only get these books from overseas or very occasionally from used bookshops if I get lucky, I'd say it's not too shabby.

Books from left to right:

• Gaywyck by Vincent Virga - the first ever explicitly gay Gothic romance, real eager to read this one
• Cast a Cold Eye by Alan Ryan - a gorgeous Irish ghost story, one of my favorite non-King vintage horror reads out there
• Finishing Touches by Thomas Tessier - a very praised psychological horror novel with an erotic edge by a respected genre author, also eager to get to this
• The Red Planet by Robert Heinlein - a delightfully dated sci-fi romp from 1949, and one of my first ever reads in English
• The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett - a gift from a dear friend, and a very fun (if flawed) fantasy read; not gonna review it here, because everyone and their mum knows Mr. Pratchett, but it's a respected part of my collection all the same
• Invaders From Mars by Ray Garton - a novelization of a movie I very much haven't seen, but Ray Garton had written some famously grotesque horror stuff, so I'm interested in seeing what he brings to the table here
• Dark Forces, edited by Kirby McCauley - a reprint of a legendary horror anthology from before the great horror paperback boom, I found it a bit of an uneven read but I can absolutely understand why it was so groundbreaking at the time
• Gabriel by Lisa Tuttle - I love Lisa Tuttle, this is one of her lesser-known novels, but I'm looking forward to it; great luck to snag a reprint in good condition
• The Green Brain by Frank Herbert - featured it in just the previous post, a sci-fi book by one of the genre greats with a gorgeous cover
  
• The Cradle Will Fall by Mary Higgins Clark - also featured this one, I wasn't exactly enamored with it on first read, but the cover art is striking
• The Terrified Heart by Alicia Grace - real obscure 70's Gothic romance I found in a used bookshop (miracles do happen)
• Hawk & Fisher by Simon Green - gritty fantasy about a married couple of peacekeepers in a rough city, and the first in a pretty well-regarded series
• the novelizations for Aliens (Alan Dean Foster), The Abyss (Orson Scott Card), The Terminator (Randall Frakes, Bill Wisher) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (Randall Frakes) - I live and breathe all the James Cameron movies that starred Michael Biehn (shut up, he was in T2 if you squint) and this is sort of my collection within a collection; I also own the Tombstone novelization because big fan of Mr. Biehn here, but that one is post-1990, so didn't put it on the shelf
• Vampire Beat by Vincent Courtney - a tacky crime-horror novel about a vampire cop, gotta love the concept alone
• The Lure by Felice Picano - a lurid, raunchy thriller set in the underground gay scene of the 70's, praised by Stephen King himself
  

I'll confess that I haven't read all these books yet (Cast a Cold Eye is my current read, for instance), but they all have a certain something about them - in some cases the cover art, in others the premise or the writers themselves - that makes me very eager to discover what they hold between the covers. I'm also looking to expand my collection with a few more interesting and obscure reads I hunt down in various used bookshops, so you can definitely expect more posts about Le Genre Shelf as it grows.

Oculus Presents: Three rare vintage book covers

Hey, folks, this is Oculus Presents. Again.

I'm not exactly a book collector, my occasional eBay and Thriftbooks browsing aside - as much as I love forgotten and underrated genre fiction, I'm usually content to just long from afar for the truly rare out-of-print editions that go for huge prices on the collectors' market. One of the reasons I admire Valancourt Books so much (I urge y'all specfic fans to check out their catalog and throw a few bucks their way if you can - I'm not, like, affiliated with them or anything, I just think they're really neat) is the fact that they've brought back to life a whole lot of highly sought-after books that were either very rare or flat-out impossible to track down. But it does happen sometimes that I run into a real gem during my library and used bookshop trips - something that while not completely unavailable on the market, is enough of a curiosity to catch my eye. Hell, sometimes I won't even know they're rare until I check for them on the internet. I own three particular books that are really anything but rarities by themselves - but the editions in my library are very little known and very eye-catching, so I thought I'd share.

First off is this 1966 Pan Books Ltd. edition of Dead Man's Folly by Agatha Christie. I know Agatha Christie books are about as far from rarities as you can get - can't throw a stone in a bookshop or a library without hitting one - but this particular edition by London publisher Pan Books has pretty much vanished from consciousness, and I've seen copies of it go for 16 dollars and above. Not too shabby for a bestselling novel. Still, it's a shame, because I really dig the colors and the general layout of this cover - simple, but eye-catching with a real classy vintage flair. The book itself I've read and loved; I really think every single fan of crime fiction owes it to themselves to read at least one Agatha Christie book in their lives.

Mary Higgins Clark was a bestselling thriller and mystery writer, so also not what you'd call a rarity on the speculative fiction market; but this 1981 edition of one of her novels, published by Fontana Press, caught my eye with the absolutely gorgeous cover art at a used bookshop enough that I'd bought it on the spot. It's not a rare printing, per se, but it's definitely one of the harder-to-find ones; for a while I couldn't even track down a good-quality cover photo, which is a bit surprising given the gazillion editions of this book out there. I tried reading the book a while back and found the writing unbearably stuffy and one-dimensional, but I'll definitely be giving it another chance. I mean, I can't just not read a book I own with a cover this pretty.

Last, but not least, the 1973 New English Library version of Frank Herbert's The Green Brain is one of my favorite book covers ever printed. The colors, the composition, the rich detailing - an all-around masterpiece by cover artist Bruce Pennington. I've heard good things and bad things about the book itself, but the first few pages I'd read a bit back piqued my curiosity. I'll definitely feature this book in more detail on the blog, once the sci-fi mood strikes me again. And for extra charm, look at this inscription on the title page of my copy of this book:

I suppose we shall see if this book will also make me understand that insects are friends...

Oculus Presents: The story of my favorite Hungarian horror cover

Hey, everyone, this is Oculus Reviews. It's uh. Been a while, hasn't it.

IRL stuff has kind of eaten up my time and energies in the past year or so, hence me heinously neglecting this blog, but honestly, the more time goes on, the more I miss being able to talk in-depth about genre fiction that I love. I have found some true underrated gems in the year that has passed since my last post on this blog, as well as some true duds - stuff that has embroidered itself into my brain for whatever reason, but also stuff that relatively few people have heard about in the grand scheme of things. I mean, I probably won't surprise anyone by saying that Frank Herbert's Dune books are masterpieces, but how many of you folks have heard about his novel The Green Brain?

Bottom line: we're back with a vengeance, baby. And to kick off things, let me present my favorite Hungarian edition of the one and only Dracula by Bram Stoker:

I still recall the surprised euphoria I'd felt years and years ago (I don't think I was older than 14) when I found this book in my favorite used bookshop, although back then I was too excited to read it to really stop and savor this fantastic cover art. I really dig the sharp, surprising color scheme as well as the ghastly imagery that evokes old tapestries or perhaps woodcut art; the ship episode is by far my favorite and most remembered of the book, so I'm extra into the fact that the cover artist chose that particular bit to illustrate.

At first glance, the book doesn't name the person who drew this - even with some dedicated Google-fu, all I could dig up is that my copy is a 1989 edition by the publishing house/literary society Jókai Irodalmi Egyesület, and is the reprint of a 1925 Hungarian edition translated by Ferencz Tar. (Amazingly enough, the 1925 one was the fourth Hungarian edition of this book - looks like the readers really ate up this one.) Some more research, however, finally netted me the cover artist's name: this same cover art, only in green instead of red, adorned the cover of the 1925 edition, and was drawn by acclaimed Hungarian artist Tibor Gönczi-Gebhardt. Not sure who in particular is interested in this bit of Hungarian literary history, but I find it really neat to have discovered a bit of lore behind one of my favorite covers ever made for a horror novel. As for whether the contents of the book hold up to my fond memories - only a reread will answer me that question, am I right?

Oculus Reviews: The smart, intimate horrors of Lisa Tuttle

Hey, y'all, this is Oculus Reviews.

How do you like your horror fiction? Some people like it old-fashioned, with vampires and ghouls and ghastly creatures; others like to dip into the strange, the amorphous, the unnamable. Some seek sophisticated scares that reach deep into the psyche, others are here for blood and guts and a trashy good time. Me, I'm a pretty anything-goes kind of horror fan, but if I had to choose a favorite subgenre, I'd be pretty torn between psychological horror and ghost stories (I read my first "true" ghost story at age 5 and it was love at first sight). What I like the most, though, in any subgenre, is smart horror. I like my ghouls and creepy-crawlies and buckets of blood just fine; but sometimes you just really want to read or watch something carefully written, well-thought out, something with real insight that shows you a thing or two about human nature.

Enter Lisa Tuttle, a new horror favorite for me.

My first Lisa Tuttle was actually a short story in the groundbreaking 1980 horror anthology Dark Forces, titled Where the Stones Grow, a beautiful, folkloric chiller with a very unusual supernatural twist; but her 1986 short story collection, A Nest of Nightmares, had been on my to-read list for a while. And now that I've read it, I really wish I'd gone for it sooner.

goodreads.com

A collection of 13 stories with mostly female protagonists, this is a gem of short horror writing for everyone who likes their horror fiction thoughtful and personal. The really scary things in this book aren't just ghosts and monsters and maniacs with chainsaws, but something much more down to earth: isolation, loneliness, the stress of everyday life, grief, failing relationships—and insidious real-world horrors like SPOILER/trigger warning rape, child death and child abuse. Yes, Lisa Tuttle goes there, and while her approach to some issues feels like a product of its time, for the most part they're handled in a thoughtful and not at all crude way. One story in particular (I'm not spoiling which one) has one of the most chilling portrayals of rape I've ever seen, written with a woman's hand and a woman's eye. The women and girls in these stories are mothers, sisters, wives and lovers who have their own flaws, their own problems, their own—sometimes ugly—worldviews and insecurities. They feel like real people, which in horror short stories is a real blessing.

The first story, Bug House, is one of my favorites from the book, a dark and suffocating tale of a woman in marital trouble visiting her dying aunt, with an absolute gutpunch of an ending. The next tale, Dollburger, is more traditional horror with a child's perspective and a nice and nasty finale. The high points of the book for me, though, were the next two tales, Community Property and especially Flying to Byzantium. They're not the kinds of stories to make the reader afraid to turn off the lights—they couldn't be more everyday—but they're amazingly uncomfortable, bleak looks at a failing marriage between selfish people and at the ugly world of female insecurities. The characters in these tales just aren't good people (Community Property has to hold a record for some of the most slap-worthy protags I've ever seen, and oh, Flying to Byzantium had me squirming the entire time), and I love 'em for that. These tales wouldn't look out of place in a literary fiction anthology either—smart and insightful, like I said.

Treading the Maze is another favorite, a lovely mix of pagan horror and heartbreak; The Horse Lord, on the other hand, I don't feel guilty not personally recommending. It's great as a horror story, with a particularly chilling twist, but I'm just tired to death of the good ol' 80's horror trope of the cursed Native American property, and I didn't much care for the protagonist's husband writing "slave novels" and wondering "how to get the chief slave into bed with the mistress of the plantation without making her yet another clichéd nymphomaniac". Yikes. Yicycles.

The Other Mother, though, is another beautifully written story, this time about the frustrations of motherhood with a supernatural twist. Lisa Tuttle acknowledges the reality of women who were never meant to have children but did so anyway, who love their kids at the same time that they feel suffocated by them, in a sensitive and understanding way that was a real delight to read. The horror side of this tale is excellent too, and genuinely gave me a chill, even though I wouldn't call A Nest of Nightmares a terrifying book per se:

That night Sara dreamed of a woman in white, gliding along the lake shore, heading towards the house. She was not a ghost; neither was she human.

Need and A Friend In Need are both tales about lonely people reaching out to others in hard times; one is a story of a melancholy loner and a self-centered college girl forming an unlikely friendship in a cemetery (and I think every single woman would nod with understanding at the part in Need where Corey feels creeped out by the strange boy but feels compelled to be polite anyway), while the other one is a heartbreaking story of female friendship reaching through the bounds of imagination. The story between these two, The Memory of Wood, features one of my favorite scary tropes, the implied horrors: what will horrify you about this tale is not what actually happens (although that's plenty spooky) but what it doesn't state outright because it doesn't have to. Connect the dots and be disturbed, dear reader.

Stranger in the House is a somewhat unassuming story that again, leaves a lot implied but has an absolutely spine-tingling ending; Sun City is probably the most outright scary of the collection, with gruesomeness and more intimate horror intertwined, but I'd recommend to read this one with a critical eye because it's a very... white person-y horror story. The Nest on the other hand is a beautiful note to end the book on, a tale of troubled sisterhood and ominous almost-Gothic imagery that leaves just enough to the imagination to chill the reader.

Despite its (few) flaws, I feel pretty much obligated to recommend this book because of how well-written and sensitive it is; at its core it's an examination of human relationships, but with beautifully done horror imagery and a uniquely female focus. It's the exact kind of intelligent, literary horror I'm always eager to see more of, ranging from simply dark stories to a few genuine chillers. And since the Kindle version doesn't cost a whole lot, I'd say it's a crime for any fan of short horror fiction not to grab this one and at least give it a try.

Writing: The best of the best; sharp, clean prose with great imagery and insight. 5/5

Availability: The original 1986 paperback edition of this book is a collector's item that you won't find anywhere under 40 or 50 dollars; the Valancourt Books reprint from last year, I think? Is still a little pricier than some of the paperback horror out there, but those folks are truly doing the literary gods' work making obscure and rare fiction available in new print, so I say support 'em if you can. The Amazon Kindle version on the other hand is only a few bucks and an absolute delight, even if you can't hold the beautiful original cover physically in your hands that way. Go and get it! 4/5

Entertainment value: I wouldn't call this a fun book; but if you're aiming for some genuinely unsettling fiction, you couldn't find any better. 5/5

Do I recommend it?: For any horror fan who's not strictly with the blood 'n' guts crowd. 5/5

Oculus Reviews: Cornfields, angst and watching paint dry

Hey, y'all, this is Oculus Reviews.

Have you ever read something so mediocre that words were escaping you to even describe it? Something so dull and tepid and just nothing that it's the literary equivalent of chewing on cotton wool? And when you closed the back cover on it, you lamented the hours of your life you could have spent doing something more useful, like sewing all your shirts' neckholes shut or counting grains of rice? Because I've run into such a book and am now cursing my completionism that made me finish it when I have authors like Lisa Tuttle, Chinghiz Aitmatov and Larry McMurtry waiting for me on my bookshelf.

I suppose I should name the monster, shouldn't I? Let's dive into Marlys Millhiser's 1974 novel, Nella Waits.

goodreads.com

I'm proud to report that even though this book sucked me dry and made me want to break a window several times over, it didn't break me. Finishing it might have been the most pointless enterprise of my life, but I came through, dammit. When I came across it in the local library several years ago, the beautiful cover and the tagline A novel of the supernatural had instantly caught my attention, but I hadn't been quite in the mood to read it at the time. A few days ago, though, I was browsing the library catalog when I came across this book again, and a little Google-fu netted me the surprising results that print copies of it were relatively rare, going for prices like 28 dollars and above on eBay and Thriftbooks. My curiosity was duly piqued. Marlys Millhiser is apparently the author of several Gothic, romantic thrillers and mysteries, and while I'm not big on Gothic literature—I like my spooky fiction leaner and meaner—several of those seemed promising (especially Willing Hostage—what a thrilling title!), and I've preemptively put a few on my TBR list before diving into Nella Waits.

Yeah, that'll teach me.

Twenty-four year-old widowed nobody Lynnette Stewart has to travel back from Colorado to Boringville, Alabama (actually, Roggins, Iowa, but the sentiment is there) for her father's funeral and soon becomes trapped in a suffocating small town she'd been trying hard to escape from. At the same time, Jay Van Fleet, the mysterious bastard heir to the spooky Van Fleet estate is finally tracked down after several years abroad and arrives back to claim his inheritance. The two meet and share some non-flirting charged with non-chemistry, attracted by mutual loneliness and the fact that they both have the personalities of a slice of toast, but the jealous ghost of Jay's mother zzZZzZZzz...

I'm sorry. I'm sorry! I'm genuinely trying to write a review here, but this book is so boring I'm having trouble even remembering what it's about. I tried, folks, I really tried. The first few chapters were actually promising, making me lament what came after: I adore my small town horror fiction, all the closely intertwined lives shaken up by the supernatural (I've grown up in a village myself, and what I wouldn't have given for a ghost or two), and I was sort of intrigued by the subtly chilling prologue of Jay's old uncle finding his death in the Van Fleet house at the hands of his dead sister. Lynn's frustration with her family, who still treat her like a child and expect her to jump at their every whim even though she's twenty-four and has already been a married woman, was believable. But after a while my enthusiasm waned because nothing. Was. Happening. A good 70% of the book is taken up by tepid small-town intrigue between characters who share zero physical or emotional spark, despite the book weakly insisting that they're just so attracted to each other. Ghostly encounters are described in lackluster prose when they actually happen at all, and eventually everything comes together to die a whimpering death in a non-climax so barely-described and nonsensical I'm genuinely not sure what happened, with the obligatory The End... Or Is It?! type epilogue that I love to hate.

Actually, the lackluster prose is mostly what ruined this book for me. Cliche as it is, and even with so little actual plot, this could have been a lurid and perfectly entertaining chiller (there's a SPOILER/trigger warning possible incest plotline that's straight out of some of the more scandalous kind of Gothic fiction), but the beige prose really kills the tension after a while. I'm not a big fan of overdone purple prose either (another reason I rarely read Gothic stuff—lean and mean, like I said), but the "they went there and did this, and then went there and did that" style of writing became so grating after a while. (And it made the obligatory sex scene about as erotic as my electricity bill, in case well-written sex scenes are a draw for some of y'all in a book—the one in Nella Waits is one to avoid, and not even in the Bad Sex In Fiction Award kind of way, alas.)

Not that the characters helped my opinion, once we truly came to know them. Lynnette is a well and truly useless protagonist who has to be rescued over and over and over again, Jay Van Fleet is an unlikeable jerk (and not in the "sexy bad boy you love and hate" way); Hymie, Lynnette's childhood friend is an enigma in that he's repeatedly described with nice and ableist language (I hope y'all can stomach the r-word if you plan on reading this dreck), but he's easily the most perceptive and likeable of the cast; Nella is the most annoying, white-hot hatred-inducing ghost I've ever read about, with the maturity of a twelve year-old even though she's supposed to be a forty year-old mother (there are few words in the English language that make me go HULK SMASH faster than "mischief" or "making mischief"); the rest of the characters are perfectly forgettable, much like the writing itself.

Come to think of it, "Perfectly forgettable" would have been a much better tagline for this book.

Writing: Hemingway this ain't. Or King, or Joe R. Lansdale. You get my point. 1/5

Availability: Only if you have a good 30 bucks or more to throw out the window for a book; but the Kindle edition is there if you don't mind the fact that Amazon is evil. Alas, often it's the only legal source for a book some of us can afford. 3/5

Entertainment value: Rice grains, I'm telling ya. Or I could have repainted the bathroom. 1/5

Do I recommend it?: Well, maybe if you were shipwrecked on a deserted island and this was the only book you could rescue... Otherwise for ghost story fanatics or Marlys Millhiser fans only. I don't think I became one after reading this. 1/5

Oculus Reviews: The Terminator (no, not that one)

Good morning, y’all, this is Oculus Reviews. How do you like your coffee? I like it black and bitter like my soul. But what do you do if it’s fresh and too hot to drink? People have different solutions to that: some put it aside until it’s cool enough, or put cold milk in it… or drink it anyway. But me, I’ve invented a different path. Put water in it! Not only will your diluted coffee taste like the devil’s taint, and not only will you piss yourself off first thing in the morning with having to drink it, but you’ll get to enjoy that sweet, sweet caffeine straight out of the pot. It's a win-win scenario, isn't it?

When I told my Aussie friend about my shrewd coffee strategy, her response was “call that coffee a Depresso”—and wasn’t that the best thing I’d heard all day. I can practically hear the commercial. “Tired? Sad? Feeling like the whole world is against you? Why not make it worse? Depresso.”

Anyway, here I am, done with my daily Depresso and ready to talk about the movie I love the most in the whole wide world.


It’s no secret of mine that the first Terminator is my favorite movie ever—no secret because I will blather on and on and on about it to anyone foolish enough to bring it up. I just love it to bits, y’all. I’ve seen it at least six times all the way through, not counting the times I only rewatched parts, and man, it still makes me sob like my dog’s been shot every single time. As far as I'm concerned, the Terminator franchise is the best thing since celluloid film was invented; and by franchise, I of course mean Terminator, Judgment Day and Dark Fate. I don’t recall any other movies because those don’t exist. Right?

Now as for the novelization… that’s a bit more complicated. There are two versions for the original movie; one of them, the more widely accessible one, was written by Shaun Hutson. You know… THIS GUY.

goodreads.com

And let's just say that I ain't touchin' that one with a ten-foot spork. (Although the Slugs cover does rock.)

The other novelization was written by Randall Frakes and Bill Wisher, both people who have worked on the movie script itself—so you know the story was in better hands here. Unfortunately, the book has fallen out of print pretty much immediately, and nowadays it’s a rare collector’s item; good luck finding it under 40 bucks, really. I’d love to say that I was one of the lucky ones to snag it cheap, but the truth is that I dropped a pretty penny for this baby. Was it worth it? Hoo boy.

I assume most of us would be familiar with the basic plot of The Terminator, either from the first movie or the second one, but I'll give it a quick rundown nonetheless. From the year 2029, after a bitter war fought between humans and machines, two men are sent back into 1984 to find a nineteen year-old waitress named Sarah Connor—who's much more important to the world than she thinks. One of the men is her protector... and the other is a machine designed to kill her no matter the cost. It's a matter of who gets to her first that will decide the fate of mankind.

Boys, girls and pals, this book broke me. Here I thought the movie was heartbreaking. If it wasn't for the heinous prices and difficulty finding this novelization, I'd honestly urge every single Terminator fan to find a copy. It's beautifully written. Frakes and Wisher flesh out a lot that the movie doesn't show, from Sarah's everyday life and friendships to the Terminator's victims, or Kyle Reese's trauma and life as a soldier of the future; it's alternately funny, deeply romantic and absolutely devastating. Under the authors' pen even the most minor characters gain lives, become human and real rather than just set pieces. One of my favorite scenes from this story, for instance, is the one with the biker guy the Terminator shoves aside to get the phonebook in an early part of the story. After realizing that the huge, dead-eyed man is looking for women named Sarah Connor he briefly contemplates calling them to tell them about the weird person searching for them, only to forget it; and later he's filled with horror and remorse when he sees that two of those women were murdered and realizes that he might have been able to warn them in time. Even the nameless bit characters from the movie get names and realistic inner lives in this, and it's a real delight to see—for a 240 page-long book, it really packs some heart and humanity.

The action scenes, of course, are just as good, filled with as much relentless intensity as they are in the movie, so reading them will get your heart pounding as much as watching them would. I'm usually not a marathon reader—I prefer to immerse myself in a book, take it slow, as it were—but I stayed up until 4 in the morning to finish this one because I couldn't. Put it. Down. And this after already knowing the story by heart; the richness of this novelization, of the prose and the characters and all the emotion and adrenaline, really surprised me. And if you happen to like Kyle Reese, prepare to be absolutely demolished by pretty much everything he thinks and does in this novel. He picks a strawberry and feeds a stray dog, y'all.

Or there's this particular passage which I have to show you guys, because you're all welcome to cry with me.

The Terminator, page 173.

WHY MUST YOU HURT ME SO.

The good things about this book are many, and the bad are few; I could mention the occasional typo or the maybe one scene where I thought one of the protagonists was thinking a little OOC (at least as far as my own interpretation of the movie goes), but really, these bad parts are like needles in a haystack. If you're as immersed in this story as I was, you'll probably barely notice them.

In conclusion? The Terminator book is really freakin' good—because it was clearly made by people who knew what they were doing and gave a damn. It's a skillfully written, relentlessly dark, but also deeply touching novel that does the movie justice and fleshes it out in a way I haven't seen many movie novelizations do. If I could somehow make it so that every Terminator fan could get a copy of it, I would. And to answer the earlier question to myself... yes, it was worth it. Boy, was it ever.

Writing: While hardly literary fiction, this is really the best kind of vintage genre writing: rich, atmospheric, heart-poundingly intense when it has to be, soft and poetic where it hits you the hardest. 5/5

Availability: Why isn't this back in print?! 1/5

Entertainment factor: Couldn't. Put it. Down. 5/5

Do I recommend it? What else have I been doing until now? 5/5